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‘Hot Mess’ teaches frugal, food-minded millennials to cook

They’re life events any millennial — or anyone who remembers that era of their lives — will recognize: One week until payday. My ex is engaged. All my friends are married. And so on.

Gabi Moskowitz and Miranda Berman have experienced them all, but they turned those life experience into a cookbook, “Hot Mess Kitchen: Recipes for Your Delicious Disastrous Life” (Grand Central Publishing, $19.60). It contains recipes for One Week Till Payday Pasta, My Ex Is Engaged Enchiladas, All My Friends Are Married Mud Pie and more than 60 others, plus kitchen how-to’s on making sushi, cleaning cast iron and more.

Even the way the book came about is right out of the millennial playbook. They had never met and live hours apart — Berman in Los Angeles, where she’s a writer for the comedy series “The Mindy Project,” and Moskowitz in San Francisco, where she edits the Brokeass Gourmet blog and has written three previous cookbooks. They first contacted each other through a friend’s app, The List, whose users were able to request recipes from Moskowitz.

”I would request things like ‘The Easiest Home-Cooked Meal to Trick a Guy into Falling in Love with You,’ ” Berman said. “All of the recipe titles had to do with my life, but could be helpful to other people.” Pretty soon they had the beginnings of a collection.

“We talked, sort of off the app, about how fun it would be to do a cookbook that Miranda wrote the titles for and I wrote the recipes for,” Moskowitz said. They realized that they did, indeed, have a book — and sold the proposal without meeting in person.

“And we don’t get along at all,” Berman quipped.

“We joke about how lucky we are that we actually do get along,” Moskowitz said. “When you don’t know somebody and you enter into a project with them …”

In the book, they come across like old friends.

“The stories are mostly true, about times when our lives were somewhat disastrous,” Moskowitz said.

Which isn’t the case anymore. They do all the things that established professionals do — like visit Las Vegas, which Moskowitz did in May for her sister-in-law’s bachelorette party. Berman said she’s been here three times with “Mindy Project” star Mindy Kaling.

“We stayed at Encore at the Wynn,” she said. “And it really was so much fun I don’t want to go back to Vegas without her, because we won’t have so many perks.”

But they remember the bad old days — and besides sharing their funny stories, the book has a practical purpose.

“I feel like millennials have an interest in food,” Moskowitz said. “Millennials, especially, don’t have a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of cooking experience. I think that can make food and cooking a little intimidating.”

Brett Ottolenghi, owner of Las Vegas-based Artisanal Foods, which sells upscale food and food-related items to Strip chefs and at the retail level and offers a line of cooking classes, agrees that the interest is there.

“In our classes, we do see it,” he said. “A good portion of our classes are couples, and a lot of those couples are younger.”

Ottolenghi said recent research has found that millennials are twice as likely to cook at home as Baby Boomers. That’s especially true, he said, for those 25 to 35.

“They’re spending $250 a year less than the same age group in 2007 on restaurants,” he said. “Instead, what we see happening is an increase in home cooking appliances, of which about a third are bought by millennials.”

About 60 percent of millennials who cook at home do it with the aid of their smartphone, he said, and more than 90 percent think it’s worthwhile to cook at home even if they make a mistake.

“There definitely is this trend,” he said. “A lot of it seems to stem from the fact that millennials have grown up with less money because of the recession, so they’re a little more frugal.”

Moskowitz said one thing they hope to do with “Hot Mess Kitchen” is instill a little confidence.

“What our book is sort of trying to do,” she said, “is bridge the gap between an interest in food and a desire to be self-reliant. We’ve written recipes that are simple, super-straightforward and approachable.”

They want millennials to know, she said, “that they are not alone, and that food and cooking are easier and more accessible than they might think.”